McIDAS, ldm-mcidas, IDD Datastreams, Collaborations, and Cooperating Community Server Activities
Summer 2005

Tom Yoksas
September 11, 2005

Vision

Efforts referenced within this report are based on five of the six endeavors articulated in the Unidata 2008 Proposal:

• Endeavor 1: Responding to a broader and more diverse community
• Endeavor 2: Comprehensive Support Services
• Endeavor 4: Software to analyze and visualize geoscience data
• Endeavor 5: Distributed, organized collections of digital material
• Endeavor 6: Improved data access infrastructure

Unidata McIDAS-X, -XCD

• Version 2005 released on July 25. As of September 7, 2005 21 unique sites (out of 94 access records on the Unidata web portal) have downloaded Unidata McIDAS 2005. For comparison, 102 unique sites have downloaded version 2004.

• six minor updates have been released for v2005.

• Highlights of the v2005 release include:
  • McIDAS now uses gzip-compressed data transfers from remote ADDE servers to McIDAS-X client workstations by default. Remote server workstations must have port 112 open to allow clients running McIDAS-X 2005 to access their data. Ports 500 and 503 must also be open to clients to access data from ADDE servers running McIDAS-X releases prior to v2004.

  • v2005 includes Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) client and server updates to allow copying (with the IMGCOPY command) of selected MSG bands (not just one band or all bands). This feature works only if both the server and client are running version 2004a or later.

  • Several enhancements to the SSEC GUI and the beginnings of an overhaul of the Unidata MCGUI.

  • Unidata supports both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Fedora Core 3 and 4 Linux (although XCD has not been extensively tested on 64-bit Fedora Core 4).

  • Configuring the mcidas account and XCD setup has been simplified through the inclusion of setup scripts.

  • The McIDAS distribution tar file is now compressed using gzip. This requires that the user have gunzip to uncompress the distribution. Switching from compress to gzip reduced the distribution file from 72 MB to just under 50 MB.

• continuing support/bug fixes for Unidata and SSEC McIDAS-X, -XCD

• training workshop conducted on July 31 - August 4, 2005 at the UPC offices in Boulder.

ldm-mcidas, IDD datastreams, and NOAAPORT and GOES ingest

• In response to a user request, hourly-summary and six-minute RASS data was added to the FSL2 datastream in August. (Yoksas, Miller)

• ldm-mcidas: v2004 was released on October 15, 2004 Decoding support for the FSL2 RASS data will be added for the v2005 release in October/November. (Yoksas)

• Unidata-Wisconsin: IDD UNIWISC datastream continues to supply Unidata users with realtime GOES data.
• NOAAPORT: The Unidata-developed DVB-S NOAAPORT ingest system has been in use at the UPC and several (7) Unidata sites since the NWS transition to DVB-S broadcast. (Chiswell, Schmidt, Yoksas)

  Notably, the Unidata DVB-S NOAAPORT ingest system installed at the Southern Region Climate Center (SRCC) at Louisiana State University (LSU) worked well throughout hurricane Katrina.

  SSEC provides and supports the Unidata DVB-S NOAAPORT ingest system for its licensed users of McIDAS-XCD.

  The SSEC-developed NOAAPORT desktop ingest system (SDI) that had been used by the SRCC was being repurposed at the UPC into a GOES-West ingester and ADDE image server for the Unidata community. SDI cards donated to the UPC by the Weather Underground and St. Louis University will be used to establish a GOES-East ingester in UCAR and as spare parts.

  Full resolution GOES-East/West imagery are also available via ADDE from a Unidata-owned, toplevel IDD relay node housed in the SSEC data center. As soon as both Unidata GOES-West and GOES-East systems are operational (sometime late this fall), their availability will be announced to the community (Yoksas, Schmidt, Kelly).

• the NOAAPORT ingest system installed at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San Jose, Costa Rica stopped functioning after an apparent failure of the satellite dish's LNB. Recent troubleshooting by UCR personnel (Marcial Garbanzo) showed that the likely cause of the outage was oxidation in connectors in the signal path. After installing new connectors, the system returned to functionality for a week only to then fail with an LNB fault.

  The UCR system was put together from excessed computer equipment at UCAR, monies awarded to UCR PI Vilma Castro through a WMO VCP proposal (funded by the US and Canadian National Weather Services), and existing equipment at the UCR (7 meter satellite dish and associated electronics and cabling). This NOAAPORT reception system installation is a fairly high profile undertaking at the UCR, so its success remains important for Unidata and MeteoForum.

Collaborations

Collaboration activities remain mostly unchanged since the May 2003 report. Details can be found in May 1, 2003 Policy Committee Report.

Collaborations that are most active include:

• Collaborations with EUMETSAT aimed at promoting use of remote access methodologies (first ADDE and then full THREDDS), first in Darmstadt and then in member states, continue at a low level. The eventual goal is to encourage EUMETSAT to make realtime Meteosat data available for research and educational use through THREDDS servers.

• INPE/CPTEC is attempting to develop methods to convert satellite imagery in TeraScan (tm) format to McIDAS AREA format and eventually to provide remote access to those data through THREDDS servers.

• NWS NEXRAD Level II Data Relay. This is described in more detail in the LDM/IDD Status Report.

• MeteoForum. This collaboration has resulted in the creation in a South American extension of the IDD, the IDD-Brazil/b>. This effort captured the interest in the highest levels in Brazilian meteorological circles. More information on the IDD-Brazil can be found in the MeteoForum status report.

User Support

• continuing support of over 150 sites

• continuing participation by foreign universities (GEMPAK, IDV, McIDAS-X, LDM): Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, China (Hong Kong), Costa Rica, France, Jamaica, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom.

• additional information on Unidata User Support activities can be found in a separate report

Cooperating Community Data Servers - Prelude to THREDDS

Texas A&M joined the cooperating community server effort by opening access to a machine that keeps 30 days of both Level II and Level III NEXRAD data online. The list of cooperating community servers and the datasets that they make available can be seen in Publically Accessible McIDAS ADDE servers.

by Tom Yoksas.